Abstract

An alarmingly high level of Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) college students in the United States end up dropping out of secondary education institutions. One important predictor of academic success and retention at the secondary level is student sense of school belonging. This thesis explores NHPI college students' perceptions of how their university instructors foster or undermine their sense of school belonging. A snowball sample of 97 NHPI students participated in 18 focus groups that included students from various islands and ethnicities in Oceania who were attending one U.S. university in the Pacific Rim. Focus group data were transcribed and analyzed using a thematic analytic approach. Open coding was conducted to investigate ways that NHPI participants talked about how their instructors did or did not help them feel a sense of belonging at the university. Four main findings emerged from this study. First, NHPI students were able to articulate ways their instructors fostered or undermined school belonging, highlighting the importance of instructors for fostering school belonging. Second, responses reveal that NHPI students feel a sense of school belonging when instructors show care and build bridges for academic success. NHPI students also noted why these were so important for them, given their cultural backgrounds and experiences. Conversely, when instructors failed to show care or build bridges, NHPI students shared how directly and devastatingly their sense of school belonging was undermined. Third, many NHPI students shared the positive and negative impacts of these school belonging experiences as pertaining to academic self-efficacy, motivation, and persistence. Finally, NHPI students articulated how important it was for them to have instructors who chose to attend to the student-teacher relationship and were able to provide cultural representation within their classrooms. There are several implications from this study for university instructors who work with NHPI students. First, the teacher-student relationship really matters for these students and instructors must develop relationships with their NHPI students in meaningful ways. Second, instructors should seek to create safe spaces for their NHPI students to speak and share. Third, instructors need to be explicit in their instruction and build the bridges for academic success that NHPI students cannot build for themselves. Overall, instructors should be made aware that they really matter for fostering or undermining NHPI students' experiences of school belonging in the college or university setting.

Degree

MA

College and Department

David O. McKay School of Education; Teacher Education

Rights

https://lib.byu.edu/about/copyright/

Date Submitted

2024-04-18

Document Type

Thesis

Handle

http://hdl.lib.byu.edu/1877/etd13161

Keywords

Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders, school belonging, teacher role

Language

english

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